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On the subject of planning I'll simply say that the problem, the real problem, is that Australia has lost focus on technical things in general.
Australian Energy Market Operator which replaced NEMMCO, that being the National Electricity Market Management Company.
Engineering? Well to be blunt that was simply taken for granted, a given if you like, and there wasn't much interest in it. To say it was overlooked is quite an understatement really.
There were plenty who mocked when almost 20 years ago all the calculations were done in Tasmania about integrating high levels of wind power into a system which also had a DC interconnector to Victoria. What was the point? Look here - you don't have an interconnector working yet and you don't have wind farms either so this looks rather like a "make work" exercise to keep people in a job.
That was very much the thinking from one side of politics. 20 years later and there is indeed an interconnector, there are indeed wind farms, and in 2016 we had another state, SA, completely blacked out because they failed to do the same exercise. Technical people 1, conservative politicians 0.
Reality is that the technical side of all this has been overlooked, taken for granted, since most of the people who did such things were purged out in most states back in the 1990's. It's to the point that in some cases there's simply nobody still working in Australia with the required skill, literally the whole lot are gone, so there's no option other than to bring people from overseas.
What's needed is a return to focusing on the technical aspects first and foremost rather than this "tail wagging dog" obsession with economic theory and politics which dominates at present.
I don't blame AEMO, they're in the somewhat impossible situation of being a financial organisation running a technical operation without the required authority to do so. AEMO themselves get plenty of knockbacks when they want to do things, they spend plenty of time arguing with the various regulators and so on. There's an awful lot of obstruction thrown their way by politicians and the assortment of government bodies from the ACCC to the AEMC to the AER and so on and it all has one very clear message - anything technical shall be subservient to finance, markets and economic theory and is considered a very, very low priority even if it's an actually drastic problem.
On a positive note, well there's people like Kate Summers who don't hold back in calling it like it is. She's had plenty to say on the madness of it all from a purely technical perspective.
Then there's those at the corporate level who in layman's terms have more guts than the rest so far as keeping control is concerned. There's not enough of them but it's not zero thankfully and ultimately they'll drag the rest forward even if it does take a decade or two longer than it ought to.
Australian Energy Market Operator which replaced NEMMCO, that being the National Electricity Market Management Company.
Engineering? Well to be blunt that was simply taken for granted, a given if you like, and there wasn't much interest in it. To say it was overlooked is quite an understatement really.
There were plenty who mocked when almost 20 years ago all the calculations were done in Tasmania about integrating high levels of wind power into a system which also had a DC interconnector to Victoria. What was the point? Look here - you don't have an interconnector working yet and you don't have wind farms either so this looks rather like a "make work" exercise to keep people in a job.
That was very much the thinking from one side of politics. 20 years later and there is indeed an interconnector, there are indeed wind farms, and in 2016 we had another state, SA, completely blacked out because they failed to do the same exercise. Technical people 1, conservative politicians 0.
Reality is that the technical side of all this has been overlooked, taken for granted, since most of the people who did such things were purged out in most states back in the 1990's. It's to the point that in some cases there's simply nobody still working in Australia with the required skill, literally the whole lot are gone, so there's no option other than to bring people from overseas.
What's needed is a return to focusing on the technical aspects first and foremost rather than this "tail wagging dog" obsession with economic theory and politics which dominates at present.
I don't blame AEMO, they're in the somewhat impossible situation of being a financial organisation running a technical operation without the required authority to do so. AEMO themselves get plenty of knockbacks when they want to do things, they spend plenty of time arguing with the various regulators and so on. There's an awful lot of obstruction thrown their way by politicians and the assortment of government bodies from the ACCC to the AEMC to the AER and so on and it all has one very clear message - anything technical shall be subservient to finance, markets and economic theory and is considered a very, very low priority even if it's an actually drastic problem.
On a positive note, well there's people like Kate Summers who don't hold back in calling it like it is. She's had plenty to say on the madness of it all from a purely technical perspective.
Then there's those at the corporate level who in layman's terms have more guts than the rest so far as keeping control is concerned. There's not enough of them but it's not zero thankfully and ultimately they'll drag the rest forward even if it does take a decade or two longer than it ought to.